Heroku buildpack: TeX

This is a Heroku buildpack for working with TeX documents. In its raw form, it simply bundles a working TeX Live environment into your Heroku app and doesn't do anything else with it.

$ ls

$ heroku create --buildpack git://github.com/holiture/heroku-buildpack-tex.git

$ git push heroku master
...
-----> Heroku receiving push
-----> Fetching custom build pack... done
-----> TeX app detected
-----> Fetching TeX Live 20120511
...

This can be useful if you simply want to play around with TeX Live without having to build or install it yourself. You can pull it up on your instance easily in bash:

$ heroku run bash

Multipacks

More likely, you'll want to use it as part of a larger project, which needs to build PDFs. The easiest way to do this is with a multipack, where this is just one of the buildpacks you'll be working with.

$ cat .buildpacks
git://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-python.git
git://github.com/holiture/heroku-buildpack-tex.git

$ heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=git://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

This will bundle TeX Live into your instance without impacting your existing system. You can then call out to executables like pdflatex as you would on any other machine.

Auto-build

Another potential use is simply for building a specific document. This can be useful if you're working with a document pipeline that outputs LaTeX documents, but not often enough to need it integrated into a larger system. Rather than having to build and install TeX Live yourself, you can use this buildpack to do it for you.

This funcionality is provided by a special autobuild branch. To activate it, simply append #autobuild to the buildpack URL and make sure you have a document.tex at the root of your repository. It can reference other .tex files as necessary, as long as the main file is called document.tex.

$ ls
document.tex

$ heroku create --buildpack git://github.com/holiture/heroku-buildpack-tex.git#autobuild

$ git push heroku master
...
-----> Heroku receiving push
-----> Fetching custom build pack... done
-----> TeX app detected
-----> Fetching TeX Live 20120511
-----> Building document.tex
       Wrote 3 pages to document.pdf

This will output a PDF file, which you can download it using your browser as document.pdf at the root of your app's URL. For example, if your document app is called silent-night-1234, you'd be able to find your completed document at http://silent-night-1234.herokuapp.com/document.pdf.